


Technical Difficulties

by etothey



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, F/F, MMORPGs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 07:07:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27466912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey/pseuds/etothey
Summary: A glitch in World of Tombcraft might be just what Harrow needs to spice up her roommate situation.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 10
Kudos: 46
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Technical Difficulties

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gamerfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamerfic/gifts).



_We'd level faster if you weren't playing a necro,_ Gideon said over the chat channel for the umpteenth time as they approached the raid site.

"Griddle," Harrow said, her inexhaustible stores of patience finally nearing exhaustion, "we're _roommates_. You can just use your words."

It was, as rentals went, not too bad. The only problem was that there was one (1) large room inadequately partitioned with gauzy black curtains ("Like someone dissected a Goth for parts," Gideon liked to say), a kitchenette, and a bathroom with problematic plumbing. All of which meant that Harrow had Gideon up her nose all the time. They even worked in the same office building, and now they were partied up in the same damn MMORPG. If they got any closer, they'd merge into a single amoebic glob, a fate Harrow was determined to avoid.

From her perch at the end of the battered black couch, Gideon mimed exaggerated mouth-flapping motions with her hand, then chortled at Harrow's expression. Despite all the hand-miming she did, Gideon never dropped her gaming laptop. The girl had the reflexes of a tennis player. Harrow fantasized sometimes about seeing Gideon's laptop, and its decorative collection of busty anime girl stickers, crash to the floor.

Harrow sat at the other end of the couch. Her own laptop was top of the line, one more grudgingly accepted gift from her late parents and her morally dubious inheritance. She gritted her teeth, tasting the dregs of her coffee. She hated coffee, but the raid promised to drag out into the wee hours, and never let it be said that her Necromancer was a _liability_ because she, Harrow, had refused to succumb to modern conveniences like caffeine.

"C'mon, you'll love it," Gideon had said two days ago when they'd scheduled this shindig. They'd been getting lunch together at the dismal cantina that no one else in their office frequented. Gideon said things like "shindig" as though they were normal vocabulary words. "Stupefyingly bad odds. Iron Man mode so if we die, it's _final_." And she grinned her idiot grin like that was some sort of enticement.

Harrow had protested pro forma. She had aligned every rhetorical tool at her disposal, from ad hominem (a perennial favorite) to zeugma. She pointed out that they would stand a better chance of success if they teamed up with one of the local guilds.

To which Gideon's response had been the incisive, "Since when do you ever want to work _with_ people, Harrow?" To this sally Harrow had no plausible response. It was true that she hated divvying up precious, precious XPs with freeloaders. Too bad Gideon didn't count as one herself. For all that she had muscles for brains ( _...very fetching muscles,_ an unwanted corner of Harrow's mind opined), Gideon was a superb gamer. It was a minor miracle that she wanted to play World of Tombcraft with Harrow instead of haring off after some jejune looter-shooter that would reward her amazing reflexes and hand-eye coordination.

Necromancers might be considered passé among the true power-gamers who played World of Tombcraft, but Harrow had calculated every skill point and all her gear to the nth decimal point. Never let it be said that Harrowhark Nonagesimus, daughter of _the_ best stock market traders ever to resurrect dead and flaccid portfolios into gluttonous wealth, couldn't min-max with the best. She had determined early on that the Necromancer was undeservedly neglected, and that in the right hands-- _her_ hands--a Necro could outperform any other DPS class through sheer skeletal spammage.

Of course, while Gideon's Cavalier made a passable tank, Gideon would not quit bitching over the fact that she'd really wanted to play a Barbarian. "C'mon, Harrow," she liked to gripe, "my avatar could've had _muscles_." And she leered as she flexed for Harrow's not-entirely-unwilling regard.

Harrow couldn't help but remember the discussion. She'd pointed out that, according to the lore, Necromancers preferred to partner up with Cavaliers with their elegant rapiers. Not with _Barbarians_ , who got bonuses when wielding the ugly, awkward two-handers that Gideon had a hard-on for. Gideon, ordinarily so contemptuous of Tombcraft lore, had hemmed and hawed and eventually given in. If Harrow hadn't known better, she would have suspected a _flirtatious_ edge to the behavior...but that was clearly absurd.

Aha. Harrow's character, also named Harrow ("You have no imagination," Gideon complained), clipped through some bushes that would have looked more at home in a Japanese garden, then came up behind Gideon's Cavalier. The Cavalier's screen name was TheNinthIsComing. Every day Harrow thanked whatever deities were listening that Gideon hadn't slipped something even more suggestive past the game censors.

 _Ready wards,_ Gideon said over chat.

Harrow decided it wasn't worth arguing with Gideon. "Ready," Harrow said curtly, and spammed wards in a sequence custom-designed to nuke the unholy hell out of the ugly, murderous constructs that were their opponents in the Canaan House quest.

Gideon--it was hard to think of her as _TheNinthIsComing_ without losing one's concentration--lunged forward, an impossible distance if her avatar had been merely human and bound by the laws of physics, shouting, "LEEROY JENKINS!!!" Harrow was convinced that Gideon would have loved this opening move and the accompanying battle-cry even if it didn't have the necessary and sensible side-effect of pulling aggro from her ludicrously flimsy Necro.

The Cavalier spun and gyred, skewering everything in her radius. Under Gideon's commands, the avatar had the beauty of an onslaught of theorems overcoming a misplaced vincula. There was a needling mathematical precision to the way she picked her targets. Harrow, daughter to two people who had been mathematical as balls, never failed to appreciate this sort of mastery, even if it came from her terrible wonderful roommate.

Harrow didn't remain idle while all this happened. As soon as the first of the hostiles fell, her bone wards spun into effect. Sigils glowed a septic red-violet-brown, then exploded one by one into light the color of congealed marrow. From each temporary corpse rose a skeleton, pristine and predatory, ready to fight on her behalf.

 _Assuming control,_ Harrow thought clinically as she tapped out the commands that replenished her Necro's mana supply and regenerated the bone wards. So focused was she on her task, topping up her health with the occasional potion when a ranged attack got past Gideon's defenses - _I took an arrow in the knee!_ \- that it took her a moment to realize that her laptop monitor had gone to snow, if snow came in rainbow pixels.

"What the absolute hell?" Harrow bit out.

Harrow's laptop and Gideon's gleeped once per second, not quite in unison.

"It crashed," Gideon said, coming up for air. Her amber eyes were very wide in the glow radiating from her screen. Harrow, fixated on those eyes, saw the moment Gideon's laptop went to its bluescreen death. Gideon started to laugh. "Whatevs. There’s no getting those characters back. Press F to pay respects. Harrow, you _murdered_ the servers. Must have been a stack overflow."

"Blame it on me, why don't you," Harrow said, bristling with well-trained, instinctive defensiveness.

Gideon kept laughing. "No, you magnificent bitch, I know you have a console logger and don't give me all that claptrap about 'cheating.' Take a look."

Reluctantly, Harrow alt-tabbed out and nipped into debugging mode, easy as a knife through cotton candy. Sure enough: that little exploit she had figured out had made her necromancy so efficient that the number of skeletons she raised exceeded the local instance's capacity for--

"Blah, blah, blah," Gideon interrupted. Harrow realized she had automatically started explaining what had happened. "Whatevs, there's no getting those characters back."

Harrow slumped. She had been starting to enjoy herself. Even if that meant enjoying herself with Gideon, what was wrong with her? Sure, she could start over, but it wasn't the same.

Gideon set her laptop down on the coffee table and scooted over. Harrow was so startled that she didn't, e.g., flinch and skedaddle for the next chair over, her usual modus operandi. Besides, the gleam in Gideon's amber eyes had an almost hypnotic quality. Harrow imagined that this was what it felt like to be trapped in rush hour on the way to work, something she had no actual experience with since she was lucky enough to live within fifteen minutes' walk of the office.

"You know," Gideon breathed right into Harrow's face, "there are much more fun things we could do."

"I have no idea what you're babbling about, Griddle," Harrow lied.

Gideon? Showing interest in her? Gideon, with the hair that was so red it had to be real, and the hot amber eyes, and the muscular vigor of a Visigoth thundering through an effete and helpless Rome. It occurred to Harrow immediately afterward that she, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, was represented by Rome in this analogy.

Gideon bared her teeth at Harrow. "Take a flying leap, Harrow. You can't seem to decide whether you're my friend or my enemy. I guess that makes us frenemies. But wouldn't it be so much better to be frenemies with benefits?"

"That is the most ridiculous thing I ever heard in my life," Harrow declared, with perfect honesty, and put a stop to whatever Gideon's riposte would have been by pulling Gideon down atop her and pressing her lips to Gideon's.

Some time later, Gideon nuzzled Harrow's neck and murmured, in a voice like sin, "I hope our games crash more often."

"We do _not_ , Gideon," Harrow shot back. "I spent eighty hours and twenty-three minutes on that character!"

What hung in the air, unspoken: _Eighty hours and twenty-three minutes gaming with_ you.

"You are the sexiest spreadsheet I've ever banged, you know that?"

Harrow shut her up again with another kiss. The servers came back up, but neither of them noticed.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my betas, Isis, Irusu, and myrialux.


End file.
